Esquire's Very Specific Guide to the Great Outdoors

A man needs fresh air. But there are 3,796,742 square miles in the United States, so a man needs a little direction. Here it is: a GPS-enabled list of the exact places to go while the days are long. Pick a few, or make your own list. Just go somewhere.

Alaska

Alaska

The Alaska public ferries — the beloved "blue canoes" — give the impression that all the patrons of your favorite dive bar have suddenly shown up on some National Geographic nature documentary. Cannery workers, fishermen, prospectors, hippies, backpackers, blue-hairs, drunks, and the ubiquitous ponytailed man playing Dead songs on an out-of-tune guitar — everyone's hanging out in the heated solarium at the front of the boat. Someone's passing around a bottle of Yukon Jack. Weed's being smoked out of a Coke can. Sure, the ship's decor is of interstate-motel quality. But the bar is cheap, a burger's a burger, and all around you are razor-ridged mountains, monster glaciers, and plunging fjords. Black bears ramble along the hillsides, humpback whales surface on the water, and bald eagles tumble amid the clouds. To hell with the QE2. This is the anticruise, the type of boat that you can (for real) bring your horse or cow aboard. —Michael Finkel

Washington

Washington

There's something about taking off from downtown Seattle in a seaplane, bumping through the air higher than the Space Needle as the city shrinks below you and the mountains rise behind you, watching Puget Sound grow as the plane climbs, tooling around for an hour or so, and then splashing back down into Lake Union that's ... impossible to describe.